Kennedy and the Politics of Modernity
ROCHE, JOHN P.
THINKING ALOUD Kennedy and the Politics of Modernity By John P. Roche To the American historian of the future, who can rely only on the cold record, the accomplishments of the Kennedy...
...Eisenhower had painted himself into a strategic corner by his constant refusal to challenge the American people, particularly by his suggestion in the 1952 campaign that the Korean War was a Democratic blunder...
...This is a severe and perhaps overstated indictment, but it limns what I take to be the essentials of the liberal malaise...
...Behind the psychological Maginot Line of "massive retaliation" all was calm and peaceful—while in the outside world American policy was dying the Chinese death of a thousand cuts...
...Ironically, just as Stalin died, Dulles became President of the United States for Foreign Affairs and set to work to "correct" the policies of the five previous years...
...Liberals have been accused of holding a naive faith in the progressivism of the American people...
...Stevenson's defeat was especially devastating because for the first time we had a Presidential candidate who really talked our language...
...after all, he was elected to handle precisely such questions...
...And before the angry reader accuses me of anti-intellectualism...
...It made the neo-isolationists happy because it warmed their hearts to hear an American Secretary of State "tell off the Reds"—and yet justified budget cutting...
...The Right had called the spirits from the murky deep, had invoked all the magic in the arsenal of the '50s, but the spirits from the murky deep had not responded: The ship of state had finally broken out of the ice pack of McCarthyism...
...Truman's 1948 triumph, in particular, seemed to indicate that there was a cosmic endorsement for the objectives of liberal Democrats...
...Here the President, with the aid of a series of charts, attempted to bring Keynes to the consciousness of the American public via a TV lecture...
...The lesson should be clear by now: the overarching importance of liberal leadership in the political sector, and the secondary character of cultural or purely issueoriented emphases...
...From the short-range viewpoint of the American "man in the street," this was ideal: He could rejoice in the ferocious rhetoric and relax...
...And I suspect that we all began, at various levels of consciousness, to question the viability of the democratic process...
...Intellectual evaluation was, of course, part of the total, but essentially the watchers were attempting to determine—on the basis of a whole range of considerations both conscious and unconscious—which of these men could be trusted with the destiny of the Republic...
...I must therefore end on an abstract note—with apologies, since my views may be a bit embarrassing to my utilitarian friends who get nervous when anyone talks about morality...
...But either we are moralists or we are nothing, and the nub of our dilemma is that the times imperatively require a rebirth of liberal morality, or of liberal political theory, to use a less loaded term...
...We spent an unduly large proportion of our time talking to each other —and the rest in the psychologically satisfying but essentially negative task of excoriating the Eisenhower Administration...
...Again at the time of Hungary and Suez he prescribed tranquilizers...
...In objective historical terms, such an account will be essentially correct...
...Specifically, he had to ask the American people to trust him with their destinies in a war of maneuver—not Armageddon— where it might be necessary to stop short of "total victory...
...And the investment policies of business are predicated on similar optimism and willingness to take a risk...
...It may be a generation before we have genuine equality at the social and economic levels, but the political and legal fortress of American apartheid has been fatally undermined...
...And, as a political scientist and historian (there is no such thing as "Liberal History") I am afraid that we are in for perilous times, that we run the risk of becoming ideological dinosaurs unless we respond to the challenge of the open future...
...Kennedy sensitized American opinion to the perils of the nuclear age and carried his constituents with him —nervously but with commitment—to the abyss in the most awesome display of democratic solidarity since the Battle of Britain...
...The only meaningful statistic in politics or baseball is the ratio of games won to games lost, and by this standard Kennedy hardly ranks among our effective Presidents...
...True, President Johnson did rush to the rescue of classical mythology by demanding "economy" in government, thus eliminating the most effective form of economic stimulation—direct government expenditure—in favor of the indirect techniques of leaving expansion in corporate and private hands (where the savings factor can act as a massive restraint...
...Although it is difficult for one who was urging the President in season and out to raise the battle flag and exercise moral leadership to admit it, there were undoubtedly great benefits that accrued from Kennedy's low-key handling of the civil rights issue...
...It is our obligation to take the grand principles of our tradition, the great ideal of a self-governing community living in justice and freedom, and apply them radically and without trepidation to novel circumstances...
...Initially, imitating Soviet tactics in East Germany, we simply tore up the roads to Cuba and prepared for gradual intensification of the pressure...
...As a committed liberal activist, I regret that I can supply no institutional prescriptions, no certain chart of where liberals should go from here...
...This detour leads us back to the problem in the early '50s...
...Historically there may have been some merit to this charge, but it appears to me that some of our recent problems have arisen from the converse, from an overaddiction to a secularized version of the doctrine of Original Sin...
...When Truman vetoed the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950, for example, only 10 Senators supported him...
...A failure to understand this key proposition led to much pessimism about the possibilities of American ratification of the test-ban treaty...
...It seems apparent to me that John Kennedy's Thousand Days closed the books—in a psychological sense—on much of the recent political past: closing in the process many of our accounts, as well as those of our opponents...
...Yet the deed was done, the precedent established...
...But Khrushchev, who had survived the Yezhovshchina and knew a risky road when he saw one, was not fooled: On a perfectly solid empirical basis, he calculated that in any confrontation the United States would take all steps short of action that would risk a thermonuclear exchange...
...I am convinced that Goldwater can be beaten and beaten badly, but I am equally aware of the fact that history is unilinear, that progress is not automatic...
...But eventually (after the President's assassination) the principle was enacted into public policy...
...And in the handling of domestic policy, the President must to a considerable degree throw himself on the mercy of the national legislature...
...They were scoring it, but in an entirely different fashion...
...The day he was shot, he had spent an hour in the plane pressing two Texas Representatives on the Birchers and the radical Right—and persistently he returned to the same question: "What do they really want...
...For one thing, he suffered from what Kierkegaard somewhere called the "paralysis of Knowledge"—he knew too much about the Congressional capacity for sabotage to commit himself to a militant challenge to legislative power...
...Against the opposition of great Congressional barons, public opinion gradually mobilized behind the President...
...Effectively they were saying that Kennedy (or Nixon) was the man to whom they delegated their decision-making in national affairs or international affairs—just as, at a different level, congressmen also exercise delegated trust...
...Tensions within the national Democratic coalition, which led to some Southern defections in 1960, could be increased to the point where the antique alliance would fall apart—and with it, perhaps, his majority in 1964...
...True, the Republicans were playing dirty, but the Marquis of Queensbury has never been a mentor for American politics—does anyone recall the "missile gap...
...Without for a moment suggesting that he was right in calling for a policy of (ambiguous) vigor in the Formosa Straits, I would suggest that any concretely vigorous foreign policy he might have suggested would have received the same negative response...
...Of course, if the average citizen adopted the principle of the balanced budget, the economy would probably collapse: He is in hock for his house, his car, his refrigerator, his boat, his kitchen stove—all purchased today on the premise of future affluence...
...For 20 years the liberal movement had enjoyed that wonderful feeling of exhilaration that accompanies victory...
...Essentially, I believe, the Thousand Days of John F. Kennedy marked a transition point in American politics: It undermined the power of Yahoo Republicanism and of Southern racism, though in the name of efficiency and modernity rather than for liberal ideological reasons...
...And it was Kennedy's genius that he realized the extent to which our foreign policy was dying from hardening of the categories and set out to lead the American people to a new framework of analysis...
...The Cuban confrontation is surely the most remarkable application of political physics the world has ever seen: The Soviet miscalculation was met with precisely determined optimum-force responses...
...Those of the far Right and the millennial Left who have patiently cultivated the seeds of a conspiracy theory have been left arguing with each other on whether Kennedy was killed by the Communists for double-crossing his master Khrushchev, or by the C.I.A...
...It must be conceded that Kennedy never really developed an effective relationship with Congress...
...Even among Irish Catholics, who were allegedly raving with the McCarthyite virus, 55 per cent of the votes were cast for Stevenson...
...from the outset Khrushchev was provided with room for retreat...
...And he had to bring home to the American people the fact that Communism could not be exterminated, if we so willed, unless we were ready to go down in a common grave...
...Then came Korea, McCarthyism, and November 1952...
...He made the whole quest for equality sound so sensible, so common sensical, while racists appeared worse then immoral—they were stupid Neanderthalers trying to hold back the tide of modernity...
...It is going to be as difficult to substantiate the proposition that John Kennedy was a magnificantly talented politician 20 years from now as it would be to demonstrate that a pitcher who spent the years 1961-63 warming up in the bullpen had the greatest curve of our time...
...for six years he rebriefed the past and in his dream-world took Stalin to the "brink...
...But the American people, who had knowingly put their lives in the balance for almost a week, were prepared to accept the President's prudential guidance, i.e., they abandoned the Goldwater Standard of anti-Communism...
...he should meditate on the ironic fact that if only college graduates had the franchise, Richard M. Nixon would be President of the United States...
...but Kennedy's groundwork might very well have brought delayed but substantial rewards in two areas in particular: fiscal policy and civil rights...
...The threat of Communist expansion had allegedly been exorcised...
...The significant thing is thus not the content of his policy, but the fact that he won public acceptance for a diplomatic posture that has traditionally been associated with aristocratic regimes and unrepresentative elites...
...He attempted to cut the bond of trust between the population and its political leaders, and failed completely...
...In sum, Kennedy had to obtain freedom of maneuver by escaping from the trap of Soviet nuclear initiatives —the "hail of rockets"—and from the ideological bonds created by rigid, hard-line, millennial anti-Communism...
...From this perspective the Goldwater nomination is a desperate, flailing assault by the Yahoos aimed at the politics of modernity...
...In other words, we took the '52 and '56 election results as evidence that we had lost contact with the American people, and this conviction undermined our élan, our will to fight and above all to provide the advance guard for new political ideas and formulations...
...When the history books are written, it will, I suspect be seen that the final civil rights breakthrough occurred under the (curiously reluctant) auspices of President John Kennedy...
...The '40s and '50s were characterized by a universe of political discourse which had its roots in World War II and the postwar collapse of the "Grand Alliance...
...This became clear during the prolonged battle for Senate approval of the Test Ban Treaty...
...We are not here talking about superficial mannerisms, but about a fundamental approach to the nature of politics—or even a redefinition of the political...
...Unlike Harry Truman or Lyndon Johnson, he had never been an "insider," a member of the club—secretly he may have felt that such membership was equivalent to high status in the Society for the Preservation of the Whooping Crane...
...Only in this fashion can we explain the expansion of Khrushchev's political vocabulary from that time on to include, almost as a standard incantation, the threat of a "hail of rockets" to those nations who persisted in antiSoviet coalitions...
...Moreover, Kennedy had, in my judgment, one great blind spot: He was simply incapable of understanding extremism...
...Kennedy's part in the civil rights area was far more passive...
...He brought us into the modern world, and in a symbolic way the reaction to his murder indicated a new mood of public maturity...
...This is not a call to "repudiate" anything— we need theory not polemic—for the historical fact is that with the weapons we held we took the United States away from the Yahoos and created the foundations of a decent society...
...But Stalin was dead and Dulles' exercises in brinksmanship were fantasies, founded—as Hans Morgenthau noted at the time—on the archaic premise of nuclear monopoly...
...Being issue-oriented, liberals sometimes delude themselves into believing that politics is—or should be—an intellectual enterprise...
...they were certainly not under the illusion that excellence as a Quiz Kid was a qualification for the Presidency...
...Indeed...
...And Stevenson, running against a picture on the American wall—the Liberator of Europe—still amassed more votes than any previous winning candidate for President...
...The 1952 election results appeared to indicate that we had lost what we had blissfully assumed was a permanent majority among the American people for the forces of Enlightenment...
...We liberals, who have been fighting for civil rights over the years, have every reason to be proud of our accomplishments—I for one refuse to flagellate before the image of St...
...In short, we liberals went "underground...
...The essence of any sane American policy in 1961 was an absolute reversal of priorities: a diminution of chiliastic rhetoric and calls to immediate "total victory," and a stepping-up of concrete, tactical responses to the endless Communist probes...
...In short, I can issue negative injunctions with some confidence—I know what we should not do...
...the Soviets were not billed as reformed sinners, but as partners in a quest for mutual interest—survival...
...and the grotesque Internal Security Act of 1954 passed 79-0...
...The clamor was fantastic: The banshees wailed in the hills, solemn legislators predicted that the creditors would evict us from the country, Henry Hazlitt and Raymond Moley held a death-watch for American capitalism in the pages of Newsweek...
...We had been brutally whipsawed: Can one ever forget being simultaneously denounced as pro-Communist for "losing China" and as a "war party" for intervening in Korea...
...With a fixated legalism, Dulles seemed to think that he could at the appellate level reverse the decisions made at the trial...
...In retrospect it seems clear to me that the remarkable aspect of the 1952 election was that Stevenson did as well as he did: While the American people were clearly counting on Eisenhower to get them out of the front lines and back to normalcy, when one analyzed figures one could learn that the election was anything but a repudiation of liberalism...
...More important, the policy which Acheson and Kennan devised in 1947 was designed to cope with immediate Soviet expansionism, to mobilize American opinion to a "hard line" which was absolutely necessary in the context of the times...
...We issued press releases from our bunkers, but did not emerge to take the offensive...
...Our friends were out of office in the national administration...
...One may suspect that Khrushchev only learned that he had been humbled at the brink from subsequent Dulles memoirs in the Saturday Evening Post...
...they were used to Dulles—who would have left the missiles in Cuba, organized a Caribbean Security Treaty, and denounced the evils of Communism before the American Legion...
...Let me again stress that, while Kennedy's efforts contributed to a "liberal" climate of opinion, he was not in my opinion proceeding according to any ideological system...
...We did not undertake the task of public education or stimulate a climate of opinion in which vital questions (such as the absurdity of the Dulles doctrine of "massive retaliation") could be canvassed...
...for signing the Test Ban Treaty...
...This lightening rod up, he will then turn to the legislative record as well as to the Administration's accomplishments in foreign affairs and, I suspect, indicate at some length that Kennedy was not a "great President...
...To the great dismay of European ideologues—to whom, ironically, the excesses of the McCarthy era were proof of American puerility—we did not launch a great hysterical witch hunt for "conspiracy," but rejected social paranoia for the common sense assumption that the deed was done by an isolated psychotic...
...Unless I am drastically wrong in my reading of the fundamental mood of the American people, we stand at the threshold of a new era—an era in which the categories "liberal" and "conservative" as we know them may have as much meaning as Whig and Tory...
...Kennedy achieved these objectives in two superbly organized campaigns: the first against the Soviet Union in October 1962, and the second against the frozen American Right in the struggle for the Test Ban Treaty...
...From this point on, Khrushchev had Dulles tagged as a moral isolationist—a spiritual America Firster—who would never risk Chicago to save Budapest...
...We felt lonesome and alienated—a fact which, I suspect, contributed to the fantastic increase in assaults by liberal intellectuals on the horrors of "mass culture...
...he has a good deal less "power" in this context than is ordinarily realized...
...Liberal pessimism was, of course, reinforced by the terrible drubbing Stevenson took in 1956, though even a biased view of the '56 campaign must take into account that it was a shambles...
...The reaction to Kennedy's statement on the Cuban blockage was, on the other hand, overwhelmingly favorable...
...But somehow the realities of economic life have never been permitted to intrude into the inviolate atmosphere of economic myth...
...In addition, he announced flatly (with none of Eisenhower's reservations) that there were no two ways of looking at the civil rights matter: The white supremacists were simply wrong...
...The fearful beatings we took in the early '50s tended to encourage a siege mentality...
...that massive resurrection would be, for most of us, the precondition to massive retaliation...
...Yet at the basic level of American political reality, the young historian of the future will be wrong, profoundly wrong...
...When a "peace candidate" rode forth in the fall of 1962, he did so with the commendable mission of informing the public on the crucial issue of war and peace...
...The difficulty was that to the average voter—who strongly believes in peace—the essence of a "peace candidate's" message seemed to be: "The President and the Congress are eager to see us all blown up...
...The Soviets were clearly terrified...
...Put another way, we must reassert our offensive political function, climb out of our defensive redoubts, and justify our noble claim as prophets of democratic morality...
...And to a liberal who is also a historian, the hard fact emerges that the political counter-offensive to McCarthyism was a dismal flop...
...He had no patience with ancient rubes in their anecdotage and, no matter how many times he paid tribute to their "statesmanship" at press conferences, the old magnates knew an enemy when they saw one and had their revenge...
...It is my contention that the Thousand Days marked a sharp transition in American attitudes: A whole series of issues were muted and a new set emerged to replace them...
...The one echo of the intellectual vitality of the '52 campaign—Stevenson's call for a ban on nuclear tests—was so hedged about with qualifications and defensive rhetoric that it did actually sound like a political maneuver...
...For it is now, in 1964, patent that the institutional back of white supremacy has been broken, and that the racists themselves are conducting a sullen, bitter retreat into historical oblivion...
...The President and his advisors in Congress and the Administration mounted a coldly rational campaign: The Treaty was not presented as a miraculous cure for cold war tensions but as a beginning, a first step...
...His role was to exorcize the turbulent past...
...Perhaps the notion of an inherently McCarthyite public was just as absurd as the earlier concept of the innately liberal public...
...And this happened concurrently with our exodus not only from the seats of power (unfortunately we have never had the power attributed to us by either the messianic Left or the National Review) but also from the political communications network...
...This curious situation encouraged the pessimism of European observers who, assuming that Washington, D. C, was the United States, announced that McCarthyism was carrying everything in its path and the nation was on the abyss of fascism...
...I suspect that, despite his years in the House and Senate, Kennedy was really quite bored by Congress: He was never a good listener unless he could set up the conversational options, and his Congressional career must therefore have contained a good deal of cruel and unusual punishment...
...that his domestic policy was strangled in Congress, and that his foreign policy had two major successes—Cuba in 1962 and the Test Ban Treaty—to balance the failure of the "Grand Design" for the Atlantic Community, the Alliance for Progress, the Bay of Pigs and the withering away of NATO and SEATO...
...I would be the last person to depreciate the role of intelligence in the political process, but I would strongly argue that an intelligent approach to political decisions can quite reasonably involve the application of the division of labor...
...Then precisely the opposite development occurred: The "public" (again a statistical fiction) lost faith in its political leaders, and transferred its trust to Dwight D. Eisenhower...
...Does anyone seriously think that the watchers were scoring the results with a copy of Time's current events test...
...The conduct of foreign relations was ideally suited to Kennedy's approach...
...Thus Kennedy inherited a policy that consisted of ferocious abstract attacks on the wickedness of Communism and tactical paralysis...
...To put it bluntly, American foreign policy as it emerged from the '50s was an eerie compound of high-flown anti-Communist morality and operational cowardice...
...there was no chauvinism, no howling for total victory, no effort to mislead the American people about the gravity of the crisis...
...The '50s, and particularly the Presidential election of 1952, tended to generate a profound liberal pessimism which rested at base upon an unarticulated distrust of public opinion...
...The cracked drums are beating in a void...
...Still, for the first time a President of the United States impeached the validity of the most deeply rooted economic myth in our collective consciousness...
...The conclusion was obvious: The American President was dealing with The Enemy and the American people were willing to trust him with the unfortunate, undesirable, but necessary task...
...It was (as he later commented wryly to me) a "Cperformance...
...His legislative statistics and sour observations on the Grand Design will be unimpeachable, but what he will probably overlook is Kennedy's impact on American opinion, on our self-image—in a phrase, Kennedy's subtle introduction of the politics of modernity...
...The American people had been (willingly) lulled to sleep by assurances that the forces of Satan were cowering before the Sword of the Righteous...
...Most important perhaps was the impact of his flat, factual, unadorned, unemotional statements on public opinion...
...The enormous support that developed for the nuclear test-ban, as well as the growing weight of public endorsement for a strong Civil Rights Bill in 1963-64...
...Above all, Kennedy had to change the universe of discourse by convincing the Soviets that nuclear war must be abandoned as an instrument of policy because it was a real possibility...
...John Kennedy and his brother here confronted the thing which above all others makes a modern, urbane utilitarian nervous: raw ideology unmitigated by any rationality or willingness to compromise...
...During the Hungarian Revolution, for example, the Soviets were obviously in a quandary (they were afraid—and understandably so—of an American response to military intervention in Budapest) until Dulles thoughtfully took them off the hook by assuring Khrushchev that the United States would not intervene in the internal affairs of the Soviet bloc...
...The first to be brought under public scrutiny was belief in the moral wickedness of deficit spending and the whole notion of the inherent godliness of the balanced budget...
...Contrast, for instance, the tremendous battle the liberals fought against McCarthyism in the society at large with the collapse of anti-McCarthyism in the political arena...
...Traditionally the President has far greater scope for initiative in the international sector than at home, and far less attrition from Congress...
...Our first priority is thus a total committment to the kind of effective political action which alone can guarantee the results on November 3—which can make the Goldwater crusade the political equivalent of the Pawnee Ghost Dance...
...This leads to the view that nobody should ever take a position on anything until he has studied the facts for himself and reached an independent judgment...
...This halfway house between defeat (which would have left the missiles in Cuba or brought a nuclear holocaust) and total victory (which would have seen the elimination of the Castro regime) brought the Chinese out screaming: the Chinese Right in the United States and the Chinese Left in the Soviet bloc...
...The President had no temperamental fondness for moral civil wars, but whatever his reservations the fact remains that once the genie was out of the bottle, he shifted his whole approach and threw his influence behind a strong Civil Rights Bill...
...where tactical demands might require retreat in the interest of long-run objectives...
...Never in this century has a nominee for President campaigned as seriously—in our sense of the word—as did Stevenson in 1952...
...The Right brought out all the old drums and beat them frantically for six months...
...It was Kennedy's accomplishment that the American public showed itself willing to send him out to handle the incredibly delicate task of maintaining freedom and peace in a contingent universe...
...Examples of what I have called the Kennedy Breakthrough can be drawn from a number of areas of domestic and foreign policy, but I shall confine myself to two instances drawn from each area...
...One could even argue that his notions of how foreign policy should be conducted were, if anything, in the classic tradition of statecraft as represented in our time by, say, George Kennan and Sir Harold Nicolson...
...Take the Kennedy-Nixon debates as a case in point...
...THINKING ALOUD Kennedy and the Politics of Modernity By John P. Roche To the American historian of the future, who can rely only on the cold record, the accomplishments of the Kennedy Administration may appear quite insubstantial...
...Kennedy, with his customary intellectual ruthlessness, seized the nettle, proposing major tax reductions with the concomitant of an unbalanced budget as a technique for stimulating long-range economic growth...
...The notion of 190 million Americans engaged in technical research on the problems of a test-ban treaty is in fact rather terrifying, for it would indicate an absence of that trust in leadership which is the necessary foundation for any stable society...
...But however motivated, the New Frontiersmen brought a whole new operational framework to national and international politics, and opened up American politics in a fashion reminiscent of the early years of the New Deal...
...A final contrast, perhaps, will underscore this accomplishment: When in 1958 President Eisenhower announced over television that we might have to consider the possibility of undertaking certain conceivable warlike actions in the Formosa Straits, the public response was quantitatively and vigorously negative— before the State Department suppressed statistics, communications were allegedly running on the order of 500 to 1 against...
...It would be nice to blame this transfer on History or some other transcendent factor, but I regret to say that—while I think the decision of the electorate was wrong—there was a real foundation for public concern and dismay...
...anti-Communist legislation, or nuclear testing, but the old punch was gone...
...From 1950 on, the Truman Administration was a wreck, and liberal forces in the political sector were in fearful disarray...
...Alas, we can never know whether this impact would have been reflected in Congress, say, in 1965-66...
...candidate in 1980 will probably begin his dissertation by remarking that President John F. Kennedy had less than three years in which to make his mark and one can never know what triumphs might have stamped his remaining five years in office...
...Indeed, I cannot find one instance in the eight years of the Eisenhower Administration when the people were told by their leaders that real risks were present, that the road was perilous...
...The Ph.D...
...Dulles' foreign policy was in fact a logical extension of Acheson's: "Liberation" was always implicit in "containment," though Truman and Acheson had the prudential sense not to convert operational logic into a reductio ad absurdum...
...In fact, McCarthyism was not an organized political movement with deep roots in the country, but a psychosis that thrived on the disorganization and timidity of its opponents, and on the opportunism of the so-called "conservatives," Democratic and Republican, who were glad to employ any stick to beat the liberal dog...
...While it was always clear where his sympathies in this matter lay, he seemed for too long a time to cherish the unrealistic hope that a reconciliation was possible between the Southern white politicians and the Northern liberals which could prevent a public confrontation...
...I suspect that many liberals have not yet recovered from the deadening impact of the 1952 election...
...In essence, Dulles was a caricature of Acheson...
...We must not forget the role trust plays in the political process...
...The outcome of this Presidential restraint was a tremendous effort on the administrative level to work out the civil rigths issue below the threshold of political visibility, an effort which culminated with the dispatch of the Attorney General to Birmingham, literally to "fix the ticket," i.e., get the reasonable brokers together in a room and hammer out a facesaving compromise...
...where it might be imperative to negotiate with the "enemy," even to do business with the "enemy...
...What is involved is trust, and an inability to appreciate this concept and its vital consequences has crippled the peace movement...
...It seems difficult to believe, but until 1962—despite all the empirical data that has been accumulating for the last quarter century—the balanced budget had maintained its sacramental standing in American politics...
...Despite the pathetic legislative record of the Thousand Days, however, there is another aspect of Kennedy's domestic program which must be taken into consideration—his impact on American public opinion...
...In foreign relations Kennedy inherited the Manichean universe of John Foster Dulles and Dean Acheson...
...we no longer had the privilege of going to the White House or the Department of State to complain...
...The consequences of this defeat syndrome were many and varied, but the key one for our purposes here was that in its reaction to the alleged reactionary rigidification of American opinion the liberal community tended to become hermetic and to a considerable degree non-political—a large segment took refuge in cultural elitism and abandoned the masses to their materialistic revels...
...Dulles' de facto foreign policy probably encouraged the flexible Soviet leader, who must have decided early in his career that Dulles confused rhetoric with action...
...As he told Robert Frost and several other visiting Americans, "the United States is too liberal to fight...
...Over the past half century we have exhausted our stock of ideas, those we inherited from Victorian liberalism and Victorian socialism, and unless we are prepared to spend our time as social and political plumbers, playing with the pipes and unclogging drains, we must turn to the task of reformulating our premises...
...Yet, on close analysis, was American public opinion (that amorphous statistical entity) anything near as rigid or as reactionary as the pessimists seemed to believe...
...should suggest that the ice-pack of internal insecurity and "hard-nosed" anti-Communism of 10 years ago has broken up...
...between 1961 and 1964, the whole international system founded on bi-polarity began to crumble...
...He had to discredit both ends of the "better Red/dead than dead/Red" syllogism...
...While Eisenhower carried 297 Congressional districts, the Republican candidates for the House were victorious in only 221...
...The '50s were indeed a hard decade for liberalism...
...The Attorney General apparently got an education in Alabama: He was alleged to have said on his return that it was like "going to another country...
...We all died a little on that somber November night as we learned that the Age of Banality had begun...
...The Gallup Poll, for example, indicated a fantastic growth in favorable opinion between July and September 1963—a surge of pressure so great that it led to a vote of 81 to 19...
...Thus his legislative program was quietly strangled in the House Rules Committee or in the ante-rooms of the Senate, and the bills that emerged were often far removed in substance from those that he proposed —one may, for instance, surmise that the tax bill, minus tax reforms, that the House passed (and which later became law) would have been denounced by liberals as "class legislation" had Eisenhower been President...
...Similarly, he seems to have assumed at the outset that the Southern Democrats were merely putting up a militant racist front in order to establish a hard bargaining position, that they did not really believe the anachronisms they promulgated...
...If I am correct in my reading of the state of mind of contemporary public opinion, the time has come for a basic reassessment of the liberal posture...
...James Baldwin for the alleged sins of "white liberals"—and it is clear to me that our travail was necessary before the American people would treat racial equality as a meaningful component of national idealism...
...We continued to express ourselves and to advance vigorously unorthodox positions on such issues as the recognition of Red China...
...It is important to note that Kennedy's policies here, as elsewhere, were not "liberal" in the usual ideological sense of that word...
...Intellectuals have always preferred Greeks to Romans...
...He was in the position of a man who has become a prisoner of his own press releases...
...The public trusted John Kennedy in the Cuban confrontation—and in the test-ban negotiations...
...My feeling, therefore, is that those who decided to vote for John Kennedy after watching him on the Great Debate were not registering their support for the specific propositions he advanced, which were not much out of the ordinary, but were naming him their opinion-executor...
...It even warmed the hearts of the group I once called the "Eisenhower Marxists," whose dialectical sense led them to support the President as a "peace candidate," i.e., a loser in the Cold War...
...Yet at the same time it was perfectly clear that he considered Congress an appalling barrier to the creation of an efficient, modern government...
...On the domestic scene, much the same process occurred, though less dramatically...
...there was no apocalypticism—only a sober appeal for common sense...
...Kennedy made it clear that in his opinion the emperor had no clothes, and it is doubtful whether all the incantations that classical economic fakirs intone can ever restore the myth to its pristine position...
...He simply wanted to eliminate from American politics and administration a collection of inefficient, unfunctional superstitions...
...Kennedy was deadly serious in 1960, but his style was entirely different: Stevenson was a serious Greek, Kennedy a serious Roman...
...But if what we accomplished was necessary, it was not sufficient...
...Since it was in his power to define the "risk" of thermonuclear war, he was able to shape American foreign policy...
...So-called "manipulation" of public opinion is not the issue...
Vol. 47 • August 1964 • No. 16
